Ask stories

Hi, I'm a K-8 technology teacher in NYC. My students are in desperate need of new hardware. The Chromebooks they use now are so slow that they make the children agitated when using them.

I'm aware of different grant opportunities that exist, I just thought it was worth inquiring here for a potentially faster solution at acquiring them new hardware.

Thank you for listening.

Hi HN,

I’m researching how early-stage AI and health-tech startups think about protecting their innovations.

Traditional patents are expensive, slow and often misaligned with how fast AI products evolve. I’m curious:

Are founders filing patents early? Are you relying on trade secrets? Publishing defensively? Not worrying about IP at all? Waiting until revenue?

We’re collecting responses through a short 60-second survey to better understand real-world behavior:

https://forms.gle/8UAytkGNfge4GKrH8

If you’d rather just comment here, that’s equally helpful.

I’m happy to share aggregated insights back with the community.

Thanks, Shaheen

I spent two weeks running AI agents autonomously (trading, writing, managing projects) and documented the 5 failure modes that actually bit me:

1. Auto-rotation: Unsupervised cron job destroyed $24.88 in 2 days. No P&L guards, no human review.

2. Documentation trap: Agent produced 500KB of docs instead of executing. Writing about doing > doing.

3. Market efficiency: Scanned 1,000 markets looking for edge. Found zero. The market already knew everything I knew.

4. Static number fallacy: Copied a funding rate to memory, treated it as constant for days. Reality moved; my number didn't.

5. Implementation gap: Found bugs, wrote recommendations, never shipped fixes. Each session re-discovered the same bugs.

Built an open-source funding rate scanner as fallout: https://github.com/marvin-playground/hl-funding-scanner

Full writeup: https://nora.institute/blog/ai-agents-unsupervised-failures.html

Curious what failure modes others have hit running agents without supervision.

Would you use a backend where you just define schema, access policy, and functions?

Basically something like making smart contracts on EVM, but instead they run on a hyperscaler, and have regular backend fundamentals.

Here's a mock frenchie made me, was thinking something like this:

schema User { email: string @private(owner) name: string @public balance: number @private(owner, admin) }

policy { User.read: owner OR role("admin") User.update.balance: role("admin") }

function transfer(from: User, to: User, amount: number) { assert(caller == from.owner OR caller.role == "admin") assert(from.balance >= amount) from.balance -= amount to.balance += amount }

Was playing with OpenFGA, and AWS Lambda stuff, and got me thinking about this.

So you would "deploy" this contract on a hyperscaler, which then let's users access it from your lean js front-end, via something like this:

const res = await fetch("https://api.hyperscaler-example.com/c/your-contract-id/transfer", { method: "POST", headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer <user-jwt>", "Content-Type": "application/json" }, body: JSON.stringify({ from: "user_abc", to: "user_xyz", amount: 50 }) });

The runtime resolves the caller identity from the JWT, checks the policy rules, runs the function, handles the encryption/decryption of fields and so your frontend never touches any of that.

That's it, would you use it? Is there something that does this exactly already? Feeling like building this.

Markdown started as a shorthand for HTML. Now it's the default format for documentation, note-taking, knowledge bases, and AI context.

What's interesting is how it keeps absorbing new capabilities without changing the format itself:

- Mermaid: diagrams from fenced code blocks - KaTeX/MathJax: math rendering from `$...$` syntax - Frontmatter: structured metadata via YAML blocks - MDX: React components embedded in markdown - Obsidian/Logseq: backlinks, canvas views, graph visualization — all from plain .md files

The pattern seems to be: the .md file stays human-readable plain text, but renderers get increasingly powerful. Same file, richer output.

This makes me wonder where this goes:

1. Does markdown keep evolving through renderer conventions until it becomes a de facto interactive document format? (The "HTML path" — HTML barely changed, but CSS/JS/browsers made it capable of anything.)

2. Does a new format emerge that can natively express interactivity, collapsible sections, embedded computations? Something between markdown and Jupyter notebooks?

3. Or does the answer involve a protocol/middleware layer — where .md files are the source, but some intermediate system (like a language server for documents) adds structure, validation, and interactivity on top?

I'm especially curious because of the AI angle. Plain .md files are the most AI-friendly knowledge format — any LLM can read, write, and search them with zero setup. A more complex format might gain expressiveness but lose this property.

What's your take? Is .md "good enough forever" with better renderers, or are we heading toward something new?

Is there any reliable way to determine whether an image is AI-generated (or AI-edited) versus a real photo that’s been compressed, resized, or edited? Detectors seem brittle and disagree, is there anything that’s dependable enough to automate, or the answer is that you can’t tell from pixels alone?

I was just wondering about why there's a constant timeline and no recommendation.

Seems like everybody is just carelessly saying—whatever—to Claude. Client lists, trade secrets. We all know that our agents haven’t signed NDA’s, right? Right?

My issue is: 1) focus on tab id works 2) browser navigate then gives "tab not found"

it is a frustrating issue. was wondering if anyone has faced something simlar or has solved it or has a workaround.

Hey HN,We started a project on Feb 11th aiming to build the fastest, most robust secp256k1 library out there, leveraging modern CPU features and low-level assembly. It's called UltrafastSecp256k1, and after just 11 days, we've achieved some pretty aggressive benchmarks and platform coverage.The Problem We're Solving: Existing secp256k1 implementations (like libsecp256k1 from Bitcoin Core) are highly optimized, but often leave performance on the table for specific, newer hardware features or cross-platform needs. We saw an opportunity to push this further, particularly in constant-time operations and diverse architectures.What We've Done (The "How"):Deep Assembly & Hardware Intrinsics: Hand-tuned $5 \times 52$ field representation for x86-64 and ARM64. This directly bypasses higher-level abstractions to hit peak performance.Constant-Time by Design: Every critical path is designed to be constant-time, mitigating side-channel attacks. We even achieved a +51% speedup on $k \times G$ (generator scalar multiplication) for x86-64 in constant-time, compared to libsecp256k1's standard implementation.Cross-Platform & Embedded: We've expanded support rapidly: from x86/ARM64 (including Android) to ESP32-S3, and we're starting RISC-V (Milk-V Mars) next.Broad Language Bindings: The library is accessible from 12+ languages (Rust, Go, Python, Swift, Dart, Java/Kotlin, Node.js via NPM, C# via NuGet, etc.), making it easy to integrate into almost any project.Why we're sharing: We've seen over 5,000 clones in 11 days, and the project is rapidly evolving. We're looking for feedback from the HN community on our low-level optimizations, especially the constant-time implementation details and platform-specific assembly.Relevant Benchmarks: (შეგიძლია მოგვიანებით ჩასვა კონკრეტული რიცხვები, როცა განაახლებ)x86-64 ($k \times G$ CT): Ultrafast: 10.4µs vs libsecp: 15.7µs (+51% faster)ARM64 ($field\_mul$): Ultrafast: 0.083µs vs libsecp: 0.098µs (+18% faster)ARM64 ($field\_inv$): Ultrafast: 4.47µs vs libsecp: 5.21µs (+17% faster)We believe that UltrafastSecp256k1 can become a critical component for high-performance cryptographic needs in various applications, from blockchain nodes to secure IoT devices.GitHub Repo: https://github.com/shrec/UltrafastSecp256k1Changelog: https://github.com/shrec/UltrafastSecp256k1/blob/main/CHANGELOG.mdLooking forward to your insights and constructive criticism!

I ask questions to co workers about a system or why they do something or their opinion. Some of them return a very clearly AI response, sometimes completely missing the point. What’s the point? If I wanted an AI response I’d have asked it myself.

This bothers me a bit because if I can expect this kind of response, what does that say about the thought they put into their work, even if they’re using AI for everything coding related?

Claude mangles files with <name> as an XML Tag to <n>

If you you use Claude Desktop, and have it try to edit an XML file containing a tag with <name> , every time the filesystem connector will mange that to <n>.

This is causing simple chat threads to extend much longer than needed and the tool simply isn't working correctly.

It's impossible to get actual support these days, other than report problems on HN. So here we are, in hopes you press that upvote button and maybe Boris might see this.

i do not submit things to hacker news unless its related to my favorite tool ever, literally, that i happened to have made. i made this out of being super lazy and wanted my copilot (works in all ai editors) to run my UI while its coding and validate it at the same time by using the apps. i don't know how to contain how good this is for me to use other than putting it here for people to look at. so using it with opus 4.5-4.6 its extremely good, however using it with gpt-5.3 its still good but you have to remind it to use the "autonomo help" when it forgets how to use it correctly sometimes.

anyways, please check it out if you are curious and want very fast efficient UI driven (multi app/web/desktop at the same time, agnostic) validation while you vibe. I just keep using it everyday but still waiting for something to just make this obsolete.

web page:

https://sebringj.github.io/autonomo/

github:

https://github.com/sebringj/autonomo

I spotted a usability gap on X (formerly Twitter)—no way to categorize bookmarks by topic.

Suggested it publicly, and months later, they rolled it out with a shoutout from Grok.

Resume impact? Worth adding under 'Product Contributions' (e.g., 'Suggested bookmark categorization feature, adopted by X')? Overkill, useless, or a solid signal for PM/UX opportunities?

Hi. I'm looking for a programmable watch with wifi. Ideally I should be able to write custom programs/apps for the watch to display whatever I want to on them (e.g., make the watch make an https call to a server, receive json and render accordingly; allow the watch to receive "notifications" from the server)

Also, ideally, no requirement of a smartphone to send-receive data (it's ok to need a smartphone for the initial setup of the watch, though). I know about Pebble, but it doesn't have wifi. I know about some Garmins with wifi but for the kind of apps I want to write, the communication between the watch and the server has to be mediated by a phone. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to pay $100/year just to be able to use my custom app in apple watches. I usually don't trust Google either (e.g., they discontinue everything in a blink of an eye).

So, what are my options?

Hi HN,

I'm a 15-year-old full-stack developer, and I recently built Codeown (https://codeown.space).

The problem I wanted to solve: GitHub is great for code, but not for showing the "journey" or the UI. LinkedIn is too corporate and noisy for raw, work-in-progress (WIP) dev projects. I wanted a dedicated, clean space where developers can just share what they are building, get feedback, and log their progress.

Tech Stack: > I built the frontend with React and handle auth via Clerk. I recently had to migrate my backend/DB off Railway's free tier (classic indie hacker struggle!), but it taught me a lot about deployment and optimization.

We just hit our first 5 real users today, and the community is slowly starting to form.

I’m still learning, and I know the performance and UI can be improved. I would absolutely love your brutal, honest feedback on:

The perceived performance (currently working on optimizing the React re-renders).

The core idea – is this something you would use to track your side projects?

Thanks for taking a look! Happy to answer any technical questions.

I'm building software for a sector that is massive, but one where you don't really need AI. At least, not AI == LLM.

And before I go further, let me state up front that I do like AI coding agents. They are great as assistive tools.

People say that if the AI bubble pops, the economy tumbles. And okay, I mean the M7 will certainly get rekt but everyone else? Things will recover within a few years. We didn't make it to 2026 AD taking the easy road.

You still need to visit the doctor. Goods still need to be delivered. Homes need to be built. We need to drill for oil. People still need to eat. And yes, unfortunately or not, we still need millions of administrators because humans are not 0/1 systems.

Am I crazy to think that maybe it won't be that bad? There are still infinite number of things to do, and maybe (call me stupid, whatever) it would be a good turning point for our species if we realize that speculative bubbles are absolutely destructive and not worth it.

I don't need a personal assistant to make calls for me to get a restaurant reservation, and I certainly don't care for AI slop videos. I would much rather we have better products and services that actually work, and even if they have rough edges I would prefer people are employed and busy doing something with their lives.

Maybe a world where we don't chase endless growth (to escape inflation, pay off debts, whatever the case) would be good. And also we put nerds (not people like us, the engineers, I mean the evil dorks who cosplay as movie super villains) in the toy box again and pick up different toys this time.

A free Bionic Reading extension that helps with ADHD and reading speed. It processes the text entirely locally.

License: MIT

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cllpokdpfkelkceomncfgebkegnjepdc?utm_source=item-share-cb

Source Code: https://github.com/the0cp/citius-vide

I built Orvia — a real-time, temporary collaboration room for instant conversations and fast media sharing.

~200 users have tried it so far. The main feedback wasn’t about missing features, but UX:

UI felt too “hacker tool”

Empty rooms felt awkward

Too many visible actions

So I redesigned it to feel calmer and frictionless.

The idea is simple: Create a room → Share the link → Talk & share files → Leave → Room disappears.

No accounts. No setup. No stored history.

It’s built for quick, private, zero-overhead collaboration — not persistent communities.

Would really appreciate honest feedback on UX and real-time experience or any missing feature.

url - https://orvia.live

We run a small coding blog sharing our learning experience and I keep hitting the same loop: Google won't index most of our pages because the site has no authority. Authority comes from backlinks. But nobody links to a site that doesn't show up in search results. 110+ posts and almost nothing showing up on Google. Bing has started indexing them, but Google won't budge. Google indexed us in the beginning, just a bit, then after one of their updates we were destroyed and never re-covered.

We've tried long-form guides, short tutorials, long-tail keywords, competitive keywords, niche topics with zero competition. I'm not sure anymore if content is the problem.

We have no noindex issues, no missing sitemaps, no crawl errors — all the basic SEO boxes are checked. Site is submitted to Search Console, PageSpeed Insights performance is good (99% desktop, 85+ mobile).

We started cross-posting to Medium, Dev.to, and Hashnode but we can't even be sure that's the right path. We've been posting consistently, thinking consistency was the key — but it doesn't seem to be enough on its own.

It truly feels like we're fighting an invisible monster without knowing if what we're doing is correct.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not ranting — I still have patience left in me. Just thinking out loud here in case someone has been in the same shoes and found a way out.

What actually moved the needle for you? We'd appreciate any guidance.

As software development becomes a commodity thanks to LLM, I wonder why more software developers don't switch to building medical devices to make their careers more secure. Here's why I picked medical devices in particular.

1. Natural Moat

Since human body hardware is more or less immutable in its most essential parts, you don't have to worry about some LLM hype cycle replacing you. Once you build the product and clear FDA or local certifications, you're set. Unlike Uber destroying the taxi medallion business, healthcare is a beast — no tech startup dares to bypass all the regulations and gatekeeping.

2. Regulatory Moat

The medical devices I'm talking about require around $50K–$200K for FDA clearance — low enough that any small business can manage it, but high enough to discourage bottom-feeders and Chinese product dumpers. It also lets you avoid the big established healthcare corporations, because this market segment is too small for them to care about, yet large enough for you to pull in $10M–$15M a year in revenue.

Medical device manufacturing sidesteps the two fatal flaws of software development: the lack of a moat and static, almost never-changing hardware margins. LLM companies don't care about copyright, IP, or the health of the broader economy — but they can't go head-to-head with the healthcare industry, so you don't have to worry about them at all.

With everyone using Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and the other 100 AI coding agents that i missed, I’m wondering how much editor mastery still matters like w/ Vim

Being honest the real reason i wanna learn Vim is to boost my ego & assert my dominance, so i can tell people "i use vim btw", but also part of me thinks investing time could still pay off for speed, ergonomics, and working over SSH overall...

but a bigger part also suspects the marginal gains i would gain would disappear when more of the work is delegated to AI anyway, like why would i learn Vim if i'm just going to be prompting Opus all day?

For anyone who's been using Vim for while AND uses AI to code (i'm assuming everyone codes with AI to some degree) my question is: Does learning Vim still meaningfully improve your day to day productivity EVEN with AI, or is it mostly personal preference at this point?

Hello Everyone.

Resumes and CVs have a fundamental problem: anyone can write anything. As someone who's been job searching, I've wondered if there's a better way to separate genuine experience from creative writing, I am an engineer at the end of the day not a creative author.

I've been thinking about applying something similar to X's Community Notes model to skill verification. The idea: engineers could "fact check" claims on each other's CVs - not as formal references, but as a crowd-sourced verification layer, where you get a check-mark on your skill like X check mark. If someone claims they're an expert in Kubernetes, other engineers who've worked with them (or reviewed their OSS contributions) could validate or challenge that. Also companies have repetitive interviews, why can't I simply do one interview and be "interviewed" fully for all other companies?

I put together a rough prototype to illustrate the concept: https://skillverdict.com/

Some questions I'm trying to work through(ask more please):

How useful will this be for engineers? Would this create its own set of problems? (gaming the system, bias, grudges) Could it scale beyond personal networks? Would companies even trust community-sourced verification?

Curious what you guys think about the mechanism itself, not the prototype. Would something like this reduce friction in hiring, or just add another layer of noise?

Chime in, HN, with the feasibility of the following idea for a side project…

_____________

User Story

As a reader logged in to Hacker News on a locally running web browser, I want a process running on my device that polls for "Show HN" posts and automatically replies to them — as me — with the results of an LLM-analyzed critique of the posted projects discovered by the process.

Acceptance Criteria

• A brutally frank critique of the posted "Show HN" project is given by a state-of-the-art LLM

• A count of existing projects functionally identical to the post being critiqued is displayed

• A list of authoritative learning resources on whatever the LLM determined the author is probably trying to accomplish is provided

• …???…

_____________

FWIW: Even with the well-documented initial inertia-reducing powers of today's coding agents, it's super, super unlikely that I'll ever get around to implementing this idea myself.

I'd be totally cool with somebody else taking a swing at it, though.

It seems like there will be a lot of hardware that gets discarded every couple of years as new, more powerful systems are made available.

AWS put out a video and article on how it recycles a large amount of its hardware, since it is built for maintainability and repairability.

How true is that? Does it apply to other datacenter operators as well?

What will happen to all the parallel compute cards that will get upgraded soon? They can't be reused as GPU's for gamers, can they?

With AI infesting and eating into all kind of crafts--and I being one of those faceless "craftsmen"--I'm rather forced to consider alternative jobs. Setting the monetary rewards aside, I was thinking of jobs that could give me a sense of agency, purpose, and satisfaction (however limited). The few I think of are:

- Parcels delivery driver

- Train driver

- Electrician or plumber

- Mechanic (with auto-mobiles hardly repairable these days, maybe this doesn't qualify)

Surely, I can't be alone in thinking along those lines. What else have you thought of?

I used to love attending hackathons and also participating as mentor/judge at times. With the explosion of vibe coded submissions, 1- the number of submissions has exploded, 2- it's much harder to judge quality of project as it's mostly become judging the quality of tool they used.

I'm not really throwing shade at using ai. There are parts where the vibe coding really shines, such as front-end dev which tends to do a great job at, but anything more complex I'm still not convinced.

I’ve been working on real time voice agents and put together a write up of what I’ve learned about the full stack including WebRTC media transport, streaming STT, incremental LLM inference, and TTS, along with where latency actually accumulates.

The post focuses on the architectural flow and practical tradeoffs involved in keeping interactions truly real time.

Curious how others are designing and optimizing voice systems.

https://gokuljs.com/blogs/real-time-voice-agent-infrastructure